Through all the years of my boyhood, my father was secretary of the Wilmington, Delaware, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; secretary-treasurer of the Sara Ann White Home (now the Layton Home) for Aged Colored People; and a member of the board of the local Negro Y.M.C.A., which he helped found. Besides, he had certain pet, private projects, like needling the truant officer for not making colored children go to school, and upbraiding the police for permitting (interracial) vice to flourish in some Negro neighborhoods, and scolding fallen Negro women and derelict Negro men wherever he found them. He was buoyant and earnest and uplifted in the prosecution of these activities. What characters were drawn to our house! How desperate they were (I know now) in their search for simplification and for that dignity of being that derives only from a sense of belonging! For these—simplicity and dignity—after all are the true things for which men strive. Unable to attain them in the large sense, men slice life up into manipulatable segments, institute policies of control, reduce to some petty enslaving program and to slogans the great purposes of life—“America for Americans,” “For the Advancement of Colored People,” “The True Church”—and march uneasily toward their graves under the illusion that the particular distortion into which they have been drawn is the straight and narrow path to salvation. My father was like that. I think that all the Negroes I knew in my childhood were like that. It was not altogether their fault. It need not be pointed out that they had almost no say in determining the basic conditions under which they lived, and that it was this common suffering that drew them together in the first place. But subject to the common suffering was no mass man, but classes and individuals, and what they endured together they examined separately in the powerful lights of personal and class interests and ambitions. And under these lights the caste principle, which white society insisted on and to which the Negroes were responding in the first place—under these lights, the caste principle broke down. Negroness was not itself enough. The phrase, “We’re all Negroes together,” so often heard as a battle cry, had only a sporadic potency. Within the Negro group there were bitter conflicts and grave contradictions.